Susan Sontag Quotes

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration's shove or society's kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. stay eager.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.

I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It’s tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I’m safe. I don’t have to face the consequences of ‘real’ aggressivity. I’m sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

No such thing as a temptation. A temptation is a desire, a lust like any other - but one that we regret afterwards + wish undone (or that we know beforehand we will regret after). So it`s no excuse to say, ``I didn`t mean to do it. I was tempted + I couldn`t resist.`` All one can honestly say is, ``I did it. I`m sorry I did it.``- Reborn

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.

The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of spirit over matter.

Most of my reading is rereading.

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.

No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction....What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world.

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

Life is not about significant details illuminated in a flash fixed forever. Photographs are.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever.Photographs are.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past present and future.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or by duplication

The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.

Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Although none of the rules for becoming alive is valid it is healthy to keep on formulating them.